The Kingdom of Childhood by Rebecca Coleman Page B

halfway under the cow, legs sprawled wide in a careless display of male confidence.
    Sometimes he grinned and squirted her with milk straight from the udder. Sometimes he gave her corn to scatter for the chickens, or the balls of wool collected from bits caught in the wood of the sheep pens. High above on the barn wall hung a crucifix, which he paid no mind, as though living beneath the twisted body of Christ were the most natural thing in the world. Rudi was right: even when deep snowdrifts lay outside, the barn was as warm as a bedroom. Before milking, Rudi grabbed a shovel and energetically mucked out each stall. Judy sat on a makeshift bench of straw bales, her knees pulled up beneath her skirt, and allowed her clear mind to absorb the image: a crucifix, Rudi and cow shit.
    It was all so plain and bare, the life in the barn. The wool was greasy because it was made that way, the corn she threw to the chickens dusty by its nature. The animals ate, then shat where they stood, because that was what animals did. There was no hidden reason for anything at all, nothing inscrutable or perplexing. It was the opposite of her own life, over which she was trying hard to pull a curtain of normalcy. Her mother had begun flicking every light switch three times. If a crust of food remained on a plate, she threw all the dishes back in the sink and started over. When she opened her weekly package from the butcher and it contained an extra chicken leg, she fellinto a chair, mute and sweating, breathing through her flared nostrils like a fish tossed to the bottom of a boat. Toward the end of March, Judy’s father sent her to the psychiatrist.
    Three days a week she had to go to Augsburg Air Base for treatment. Because her husband was important, they sent a car for her. For the first week they left Judy alone in the house, but the laundry stacked up and gave her mother panic attacks. At that point her father walked down to the house beside the barn and inquired, in his German that was quite clear and good, about hiring Rudi’s sister, Kirsten, as a domestic. Judy watched through the window as the two fathers discussed the specifics. She eyed the young woman who stood beside them with her hands folded behind her back: a tall girl, thin but wide-hipped in her flared knee-length skirt, with blond hair in two braids that crossed at the center of her crown. A deal was struck, and she shook John Chandler’s hand with a solid wag of her arm that struck Judy, trained by a father who cared about such things, as a bit unrefined.
    The young woman, Judy soon discovered, was very capable. She managed things just as Judy’s mother did, airing the duvets and keeping the birdcage clean, folding her father’s shirts like a shelf display at J.C. Penney. She visited on the days Judy’s mother had treatment, and on those days she always set some dish to simmer in the Dutch oven for their supper—pork chops with syrupy apples, beef stew flecked with little golden spätzle. She tutored Judy in German as she went about her work, and as she cooked she played American hit music on the radio. For the first time in Judy’s memory, her home was filled with delicious scents and cheerful melodies, and on Kirsten’s workdays she looked forward to coming home after school. Each day stood in contrast to the next, because in between the afternoons of the Beatles and veal cutlets with lemon slices, there were those in which the silence echoedin her ears, the tension gathered in each room as though the air had not stirred for hours, and her mother sat at the table alone eating leftovers from the refrigerator. Gone was the old mother, slim and lovely with her Jackie Kennedy bouffant, and in her place was a new one whose teased hair looked like an accident and whose backside filled the entire chair. It was because of the lithium, her father told her, privately. Judy wasn’t sure what it was, but the word sounded like something very light. She pictured a pink helium